A word of warning here- There be spoilers ahead. I’ll clearly mark when the spoilers start and stop, so you can skip them if you so choose.

A group of space explorers move carefully across the surface of an unexplored world. It’s a foreboding place- seemingly eternally shrouded in darkness and shadows -with thick fog banks rolling across a surface covered in jagged mountain peaks.

They come upon an alien spaceship, broken, rusted, and showing signs of having long ago crashed there. The ship is unusual. Not just in the typical way of being alien in design, but in scale. The entry hatches, the hallways, the locations of the various control panels all indicate a race substantially taller in physical stature than man.

They make their way into the ship, carefully navigating the dark corridors towards its long dormant heart. Once there, they discover- still seated at a set of controls -one of the long dead crew. The body is enormous, easily more than twice the size and bulk of a human. Its cause of death will ultimately be revealed in the film to be from an alien species that uses the bodies of other creatures as hosts so as to continue to spread themselves across the galaxy.

[Originally published on Oct 11, 2013 for another website I’m no longer affiliated with. By contractual agreement for content I created, enough time has passed that my work may be migrated to my own blog. Hope you enjoy it.]

This series is going to look at the movies that are out there that don’t make everyone’s list every year and that some of you may have overlooked in the annual avalanche of horror DVDs on the market.

In this hyper-political age we’ve seen what seems to be an almost unending debate among the political class of this land over the highly charged topic of immigration reform. Countless hours are spent arguing whether this person or that person should be allowed citizenship for this country, whether still others should even be allowed into the country at all, and of course whether or not we’re giving some “a free pass” to citizenship. But what we have not seen, my friends, is the much more important question addressed. Should these people be able to bring their monsters with them?

Because, let’s face it, until this is addressed they will continue to come, and eventually you will be faced with a kill or be killed situation with a creature that doesn’t follow the rules as you know them. Since we can’t count on legislation, we’ll have to turn to education. To that end, this series will give you the basics on the monsters that you only think you know but in fact play by other cultural rules.

Hidden away in the tiny little Southern hamlet known as Atlanta, Georgia (you may even have heard of it) there is small group of people tirelessly plugging away at making an old art form new and enjoyable again. This group, the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, written as ARTC (and pronounced “Artsy”) from here on out, specialize in doing new old-style radio entertainment, and they like to point out that there is adventure in sound when performing or promoting their stories. But simply saying “adventure” is shortchanging their library a bit.

You know, one of the staples of much of the 70’s and 80’s entertainment industry, be it in books, television, or movies, was showcasing the rampant drug culture of the time. One of the subjects that the entertainment industry liked to showcase from time to time as suffering from these insane levels of drug and alcohol abuse was in fact the entertainment industry itself. You would get depictions of everyone from the lowliest starlet wannabe to the most powerful Hollywood exec drunkenly snorting enough cocaine to kill anyone not named Hunter S. Thompson.

Sometimes they really overdid it. You would look in utter disbelief at the TV screen or the pages of your book while thinking that it was insane how much they were overplaying it. There was just no way that the drug and alcohol use was that bad in Hollywood, you would think to yourself, as there would simply have been no way that the place could have functioned if it had been that badly screwed up. Then, occasionally, you come across a product from that era of Hollywood’s history where you find yourself thinking that they might have just been underplaying exactly how insanely coked out of their minds everybody really was. The Keep is one of those films.